Spaces—Just below the ground | Art Agenda

Spaces—Just below the ground | Art Agenda
by BARBARA SIRIEIX
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/spaces—just-below-the-ground/
May 18, 2016
Spaces—Just below the ground
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Spaces is a feature of art-agenda that proposes a thematic examination of
galleries based on the analysis of their physical and spatial configurations.
Every two months, art-agenda publishes a new reflection on the spatial
characteristics of galleries, their architecture, identity, and relation with their
historical and geographical context. The fourth feature of Spaces goes
underground.
1 The exterior of the Städel Museum and Städel Garden.
There is a popular conspiracy theory, supported by shady photographs, that the
Earth is hollow. The idea traces back through various ancient mythologies to
modern times, when visionaries such as John Cleves Symmes, Jr. and Marshall
Gardner elaborated speculative hypotheses about the content of the space below
ground, including the possibility of it hosting another civilization that lives in the
center of the earth. Further conspiracies hold that Hitler escaped by submarine to
Antarctica, where a subterranean passage allowed him access to the Earth’s
interior. The underground clearly exerts a peculiar hold over our imagination.
In the context of contemporary art, the experience of the underground is
generally limited to climbing down a narrow flight of stairs to visit an exhibition,
as many commercial galleries have extended their display surfaces by exploiting
otherwise empty basements to which access is often convoluted and humidity
high, meaning they aren’t appropriate for the storage of artworks. Appearing first
as a handicap, the absence of windows can actually be an asset, as it offers
complete control over lighting and allows for the entire surface of the walls to be
at the disposal of the gallery, the underground space offering itself as the perfect
black or white cube. Sometimes it becomes the gallery’s main exhibition site
while those areas with natural light are used for offices, not only improving
workplace performance but also leading to those “aquariums” where the gallery
staff works in a vitrine and is observed by passersby on the street, as in the cases
of Galerie Balice Hertling and New Galerie in Paris.
In an urban context, garages and parking lots are often situated below ground
and are preyed upon by galleries, artist-run initiatives, and temporary venues for
the functional reasons mentioned above. Nevertheless, some initiatives seem to
have sprouted and taken root in the specificity of an ecosystem, corresponding
with the particular narratives of a neighborhood or a city. Until recently, Chert
Gallery in Berlin was located in a former car repair shop that had holes in the
ground. In 2012 David Horvitz founded a gallery in one such hole underneath the
floorboards. Called Porcino, it hosted projects corresponding with the gallery’s
program, like a mushroom in symbiosis with its host tree.(1) In Paris, the
artist-run initiative -1 (moins un) is located in the car park below a residential
building, not far from several sites targeted during last November’s Paris attacks.
In what seems now a strange foreboding, in 2014 the Brussels-based collective
The Ister invited—for the second iteration of their “Fortune” project—the Berlin
collective Dingum to fill the basement with restaurant tables covered with white
cloths, where guests sat and drank wine, inverting the paradigmatic Parisian
public space of the terrace in a space that remains invisible from the outside.
Sydney’s Alaska Projects started their activity in 2011 at Level -2 of a car park,
managing to organize exhibitions and events from a five-by-five-meter white box
over two parking spots. Alaska Projects later found other spaces for studios and
parallel projects, becoming an important supporter of emerging artists in the city,
where it also stood out as one of the only free spaces in which artists could make
exhibitions—it is standard in Australia for artists to pay to show in
noncommercial or non-institutional spaces.
Galleries located in former industrial buildings easily end up having a generic
appearance despite the fact that architectural structures are often retained to give
character to the space, as so many art spaces invest in such conversions. This is
particularly visible in older underground spaces, as they call to mind the idea of
the cave. Hidden from the sun, they conjure an atmosphere of the occult and
convey the imaginary of the hollow Earth. These are also places where the
remains of history are retained; providing exhibitions with a certain
site-specificity, like archaeological sites of the present. This is particularly the
case with cinema. In his 1971 text “A Cinematic Atopia,”(2) Robert Smithson
reflects on the condition of the moviegoer and observes that “after the ‘structural
film’ there is the sprawl of entropy,” which leads him to the ultimate desire to
construct a cinema in a cave. The undergrounds of the Palais de Tokyo and the
Tanks at Tate Modern are exemplary of this. In 2013 I had the pleasure of
creating this kind of display by installing Pauline Curnier Jardin’s video Grotta
Profonda (2011)—about a mystical revelation in a cave—in the basement of Nettie
Horn Gallery in London. Galerie Marcelle Alix in Paris often presents film
installations in its underground space, shaped like a grotto and furnished with
chairs like those in a cinema.
2 View of the contemporary art collection at the Städel
Museum, Frankfurt.
3 View of Daniel Santiago's "an invisible portrait," Porcino
Gallery, Berlin, 2014.
4 View of Renata Kaminska’s "Hundert Millionen," Porcino
Gallery, Berlin, 2015.
5 View of "A Matter of Taste," moins un, Paris, 2014.
The site-specificity of the underground space is also a matter of interest for
architects. During the restoration of the building that hosts the FUTURA Center
for Contemporary Art in Prague, founder and architect Alberto Di Stefano
uncovered the old structures of the edifice and reconnected its different parts in
unexpected ways. Moving from white to brick walls, it seems like the gallery
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Spaces—Just below the ground | Art Agenda
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/spaces—just-below-the-ground/
gradually dissolves as one moves further underground. Sometimes radical
projects that explore the possibilities of underground structures emerge out of
the need to deal with spatial or environmental constraints, as in the case of the
new extension of Frankfurt’s Städel Museum—designed by Schneider +
Schumacher, it reshapes the museum’s garden as a field of circular skylights onto
a vast underground space—or the Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, constructed
directly int a hill as not to impact on the scenery of the Seto Inland Sea.
The difficulties of the underground space—with regards to the wellbeing of the
gallery’s staff or the limiting conditions for exhibitions—come from the fact that
these places were rarely designed for human habitation. Thus some of the most
durable underground art spaces are actually part of an institution that is mostly
located above ground, and are in fact semi-underground and provided with
windows. The Crédac art centre in Ivry, just outside of Paris, used to be located
beneath a beautiful brutalist complex. Its program considered this
site-specificity, as in the exhibition “Mental Archeology” (2010), where the works
of Matti Braun, Thea Djordjadze, and Jean-Luc Moulène were presented as
different approaches to archeology as mental process. Five years ago, it moved to
a new location in a historic factory, a glass box overlooking the city, which
stimulates new responses to the site.
The conversion of obsolete functional buildings, in line with an urban politics of
sustainability, bears certain responsibilities. The proliferation of private
collections investing in former bunkers, such as the Sammlung Boros in Berlin or
The Feuerle Collection—also in Berlin, and one of the designated spaces for the
upcoming Berlin Biennale—raises questions about the politics of these
institutions and their duty towards history. When a former military facility is
preserved as a monument, it not only exhibits its architecture but also its disuse,
which fosters the work of memory. The artworks presented there may be
exquisite, may be political, but they will nevertheless take the space of a
necessary emptiness.
6 Alaska Projects, Sydney.
7 FUTURA Center for Contemporary Art, Prague.
(1) In April 2016 Chert Gallery relocated to a new venue on Ritterstrasse,
accompanied by Porcino. David Horvitz’s “Ja” is showing at Chert to June 11,
while Porcino hosts painter Marley Freeman.
(2) “A Cinematic Atopia” was originally published in Artforum, September 1971:
53-55.
Barbara Sirieix is a writer and curator based in Paris.
8 Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima.
9 View of "Mental Archaeology," Centre d’art contemporain
d’Ivry le Crédac, 2010.
10 View of Delphine Coindet's "Modes & Usages de l'art," le
Crédac, 2015.
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Spaces—Just below the ground | Art Agenda
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11 Basim Magdy, Our Prehistoric Fate, 2011. Installed at the
Third Project Biennial, D-0 ARK Underground, Konjic, 2015.
1 The exterior of the Städel Museum and Städel Garden.
Image courtesy of the Städel Museum.
2 View of the contemporary art collection at the Städel
Museum, Frankfurt. Image courtesy of the Städel Museum.
3 View of Daniel Santiago's "an invisible portrait," Porcino
Gallery, Berlin, 2014. Curated by Zanna Gilbert. Image
courtesy of the artist and Porcino Gallery, Berlin.
4 View of Renata Kaminska’s "Hundert Millionen," Porcino
Gallery, Berlin, 2015. Curated by Julia Wielgus. Image
courtesy of the artist and Porcino Gallery, Berlin.
5 View of "A Matter of Taste," moins un, Paris, 2014. Proposed
by The Ister, curated by Dingum. Photo by Nacho Pike.
6 Alaska Projects, Sydney. Image courtesy of Alaska Projects.
7 FUTURA Center for Contemporary Art, Prague. Image
courtesy of FUTURA.
8 Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima. Image courtesy of Chichu
Art Museum. Photo by Fujitsuku Mitsumasa.
9 View of "Mental Archaeology," Centre d’art contemporain
d’Ivry le Crédac, 2010. Image courtesy of le Crédac. Photo
by André Morin .
10 View of Delphine Coindet's "Modes & Usages de l'art," le
Crédac, 2015. Image courtesy of Galerie Laurent Godin,
Paris, galerie Anne Mosseri-Marlio, Bâle, the artist and le
Crédac. Photo by André Morin.
11 Basim Magdy, Our Prehistoric Fate, 2011. Installed at the
Third Project Biennial, D-0 ARK Underground, Konjic, 2015.
Jonas Staal’s “Propagandas”
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